Jean Arp
Strasbourg 16 Sept. 1887 – Solduno 1 June 1966
Born Hans Arp, in 1904, he left the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, to visit Paris. During this time he first published his poetry. From 1905 to 1907, he studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, and in 1908 returned to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1916, Arp co-founded the influential DaDa cultural movement in Zürich. The movement was involved with visual arts, literature, art theory, theatre and graphic design, and rejected the prevailing standards in art. A reaction to the horrors of WWI, and an overtly anti-war movement, Dadaism reached peaked from 1916 to 1922, but is considered the grandparent of later anarchistic and avant-garde movements including surrealism, pop art, and punk. Arp, along with Zzara and Serner, invented Automatic Poetry. In 1917 he created his first abstract wooden reliefs. Arp died in Switzerland in 1966.

Enrico Baj
Milan October, 31, 1924 – Vergiate June 2003
Baj was an Italian artist and writer. Born into a weathy family, he left Italy in 1944 to avoid conscription. A self proclaimed anarchist, Baj’s work included prints, sculptures and collage, and much of his art shows an obsession with nuclear war. In 1951 he founded the overtly political arte nuclear movement with Sergio Dangelo. Close to the surrealist and dada movements, Baj was later associated with pop art. As an author he was a leading promoter of the avant-garde. He collaborated with Umberto Eco among others.

Jacqueline Zena Benyes
My goal with my work is to capture timelessness in an image, and use the beautiful elements of classicism or formal qualities such as composition, light, colour and shape in new and postmodernist ways. I want these images to present to the viewer a sense of the past and the eternal in a way that encapsulates the moment of observation, the all-powerful moment of the here and now. This work is in colour so as to allow the viewer the possibility of participating fully in the image. The usage of colour allows for a more complete representation of all the colours of the spectrum so as to hopefully see more of the subtleties of the world. I am always looking for new things to photograph in new ways that challenge my eye as a photographer and the imagination of the viewer. Some of the images submitted for the show are photographs I took at night. I am most inspired when photographing at night and this has been an element of my work for over 20 years. The peace and tranquility in these scenes are what I hope will transcend for the viewer. Metaphysical Themes also figure heavily in much of my photography.

Andrea Bolley
Born in Guelph in 1949, Andrea grew up in an artistic household and studied at the University of Guelph before moving to Windsor to study Fine Arts. Her early work tended towards the figurative, but she quickly fell under the influence of the prevailing colour field painting. Across the river at the Detroit Institute of Arts, she was able to look at paintings and listen to lecturers and painters from New York. It was there that she experienced what she has subsequently described as “a spiritual awakening.”

Alexander Calder
(22 July 1898 – 11 November 1976)

Charles Albert Despiau
Mont-de-Marsan 1874 – Paris 1946
Despiau was born into a family of master-plastermakers in Mont-de-Marsin, France. After studying in Paris at the Ecole des Art Decoratifs and at the Ecole National des Beaux Arts, he became affiliated with the group of sculptors known as the Jeunes Sculpteurs Independents, which included Camille Claudel. He came to the attention of August Rodin, who employed him as the manager of the marble store associated with the Rodin studio from 1907-1914. Despiau is known for his sculptures, drawings, and lithography as well as his portraits of the famous.

Luis Egido
A dentist in Madrid with a passion for nature. He travels the world in the far remote places and captures the wildlife with his camera and multiples lenses.
Patient and determined he always managed to capture the most beautiful moment and to freeze it in a timely basis.

James Fowler
Plain View “All art begins with grids. All artists long for grids.” – American poet John Taggart
I aim to capture the bustling motion and excitement of both a busy urban environment and an active plain of imagination. Sometimes this is manifested in my work through literal depiction of cities and neighbourhoods through non-traditional landscape painting and cartography. I find that colours and patterns found in the architectural vernacular of a city project its essence upward and these same cartographic identifiers easily lend themselves as landmarks to both emotional and psychological landscapes. The parallel between the recognizable and the imagined is joyously intentional.
As an artist interested in urban development and sustainability, the hive-like structures we build up around us and our own insect like behaviour within these structures fascinate me. I seek to recreate the animated gestures of these ever vibrating landscapes, striking a balance and harmony between the rigid man-made infrastructures and the organic and fluid way of the earth’s natural geography. In creating these paintings I hope to evoke the same lively wonder one gets when flying into a new big city for the first time when we try to take everything in or the lasting impressions stored in our memories of travelling anywhere far from home.
-James Fowler

Eric Freifeld
Saratov 1919 – Toronto 1984
Born in Russia, in 1924 Eric, his mother and sister Anna moved to Edmonton after the death of his father. Friefeld was famous early for his paintings, figure drawing, and was later renowned for his teaching. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy, he also served as chairman of the Fine Arts Department of the Ontario College of Art. The foundation of his teaching was drawing, and he fought to keep life drawing in the curriculum when it was threatened by more design-oriented trends and pressures. He taught some of the most famous and influential Canadian artists, and personally had 25 one-man exhibitions. Among his awards, he received 5 from the Canada Council. His work is represented in public institutions, galleries, universities, and collections in London, England, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and private collections in Canada, England, United States, Israel, Australia, France, Switzerland, Austria and Ireland. Friefeld’s life was plagued by bouts of deep depression, and in September 1984 he ended his own life.

Alan Glicksman
On My Way
There’s a kind of an “inner evolution” happening in my painting practice. So, I embrace it. Look at my paintings. Yes, they’re personal; but see how the elements in one work, informs the elements in another? I do. Perhaps, this is why I work in the series format? I mean, having a brood of paintings around me to choose from, allows me to “follow my nose and do my own thing”. It works for me! In the studio, where nothing is pre-determined, everything is allowed to flow. Me? I just try to ride the wave. – Alan Glicksman
Glicksman’s works are in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, Mount Sinai Hospital, Art Gallery of Ontario, Tom Thomson Gallery and private collections across Canada, USA and Europe. Alan’s art career reflects an extraordinary artist with an escalating record of highly praised works, exhibitions and awards.

Robert Groh
Robert’s work is inspired by the sensation of taste. His paintings are simplified representations of the biochemical cascades within neuronal synapses during taste perception. These synaptic events connect neurons, allowing the interpretation of flavour to flow through the nervous system.

Eduard Gurevich
from one man to another
Growing up in Ukraine and moving to Canada has given me a great inspiration and a lot of subject material for my work. Immigration gives an individual the experience of feeling like the whole universe is your home, and there is no one place where you may plant yourself and feel at peace. My family takes up the role to ground me as well as inspire many of my creations in which I try to find love and a home within one’s family rather than one’s physical house. Discovering Canada’s great wealth of natural splendor has also stimulated my interest of painting landscapes which is presently becoming the most prominent theme in my work. I enjoy spending time with my family outdoors. Fishing and skiing are among those things that we do a lot and never have enough of. The themes that I draw on in my work include my love for my family, my passion for nature, and the flux of life in which I find more questions than answers. The symbol of the fish itself takes on many different meanings as I use it time and time again as a metaphor for myself and for anyone who wonders through this world feeling lost.
Although I have a strong background in classical painting and drawing, through the guidance I received obtaining my degree in Art from Lvov’s Politechnic University as well as my Illustrator Diploma from Sheridan, I cannot attribute my work to any particular style. I paint what I see and feel, using my life experiences to guide me on the canvas. Painting for me is the process in which some of my thoughts get a chance to become visible. Therefore, I try to make my work conceptual inviting one to analyze the embedded meaning in it. Influenced as a child by my father’s art works, painting for me has become a journey of self-discovery and self-expression. Borrowing from different traditions, my paintings are experimental as I strive to best represent a thought or a feeling that I am living through. Using mixed media, acrylic and oil paints in particular, I constantly try new techniques rather than remain stagnant in one place. My life’s works represent both, change in technique and subject matter. My art is a journey in which I hope to find answers to some of the life’s most difficult and universal questions.

Ben Mark Holzberg
Toronto Photographer Ben Mark Holzberg has spent three decades actively creating an impressive body of work in the various spheres of editorial, film stills, advertising, publicity/PR and art-in-public and gallery showings. Always incisive, often intriguingly paradoxical, his strong graphic sense prevails in both distinctive black and white and dazzling colour imagery. En route to a charity golf game in Burkina Faso, I was struck by the desolate beauty of Africa whilst over flying the Sahara Desert at 35000 feet. So inspired was I, that I chartered a small aircraft to explore that awesome starkness. The photographs that will be part of the exhibit are a serie of photographs captured from the open door of a four seater Cessna.

Jean Francis
ONUS JEAN FRANCIS is an abstract expressionist artist living in Owen Sound, Ontario. Her vibrant oil paintings reflect the beauty and the conflict of what is around her using gesture, line and intimacy with the subjects of everyday life. In the last 15 years, she has been consistently drawn to painting derelict buildings, ones in the state of demolition along with the harbour of Owen Sound, with it’s freighters, silos and also the beauty of the surrounding nature.

Toyohara Kunichika
Edo (Tokyo)1835 – Tokyo 1900
Born Ōshima Yasohachi, Toyohara Kunichika was also known as Arakawa Yasohachi and Kazunobu. Talented as a child, at about thirteen he became a student of Tokyo’s then-leading print maker, Utagawa Kunisada. His deep appreciation and knowledge of kabuki drama led to his production primarily of ukiyo-e actor-prints, which are woodblock prints of kabuki actors and scenes from popular plays of the time. An alcoholic and womanizer, Kunichika portrayed beautiful women (bijinga), contemporary social life, and a few landscapes and historical scenes. He worked successfully in the Edo era, and carried those traditions into the Meiji era. To his contemporaries and modern art historians, this was a significant achievement during a transitional period of great social and political change.

Kuniasada

Stephen Lai
Designer of wall coverings, Stephen discovered a passion for photography.
Long exposures has been his study at the moment. He captures that frozen moment of light and water movement. He is intrigued by the serenity of water.

Paul Landacre

René Marcil
Montreal 1917 – 25 Sept. 1993
Born with a partly atrophied right arm, after Marcil underwent major surgery at age 12 he developed a limp. His health problems aggravated his relationship with his father, who kept him separated emotionally and physically from his family. Forced to eat alone in his room, he lived perpetually under the threat of being institutionalized. The only inspirational adornment in his home was newspapers and tiny reproductions of religious works by Raphael or Della Francesca. Admitted to art school at age 14, by 17 Marcil worked as an engraver in the advertising industry. He worked in the advertizing department for several large department stores, quickly becoming their star artist. After meeting his wife, Evelyn Rowat, they left for New York in 1941, where they both worked as fashion illustrators. Marcil was renowned for his simple and elegant drawings, and by age 30 he was very successful. However, with the McCarthy trials in the 1950`s, Marcil, an independent minded free thinker, left the US and moved to Paris. Overwhelmed by the bohemian lifestyle there, Evelyn returned to America. Marcil moved to England, returning to southern France for long stays. In London, he explored his inner self through abstract art, and honed his talent as a colourist. In the early 1980s he moved to Tourrettes-sur-Loup, a picturesque medieval village, but continued to visit large cities for long stays. His work in this late period came together with his personal past, his skill as a colourist and his drawing ability, and centered on expressing emotional detail and relationships in a social context.

Charles Maurin
Le Puy 01 April 1856 – Grasse 22 July 1914
Maurin was a versatile French painter and printmaker, at the end of the 19th century in France. A friend of the Nabis painters like Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Vallotton, his work was inspired from the tranquility and charm of interior domesticity. His greatest contribution to the art of the period was his exceptional talent in the art of colour etching. This form of printmaking had largely become neglected; Maurin saw its unique visual possibilities and was instrumental in its revival.

Rick McCarthy
Montreal 20 Sept. 1941 –
Rick McCarthy is considered one of Canada’s Maverick artists, his work having little relation with the mainstream of Canadian art. Idiosyncratic, tortuous, and fiercely emphatic forms have been the consistent hallmark of his work. He studied at the Ontario College of Art; after participating in experiments at the V&A and London University in England, and introducing a printmaking program to Inuit in the NWT, he taught drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Seneca college. A recipient of many honours and awards, he has exhibited his work in group and solo shows across Canada. His work is held in many corporate, public and private collections.

Kristin McCrea
Selecting the work for this show “LENSEscape” gave me thought. As a photographer I strive to capture my environment. One where urban constantly challenges rural. My camera allows me to isolate and frame a moment of my choosing. Not focussing on the landscape itself, but on its components. These photographs truly become “LENSEscape” and that excite me.

Heather Murray
My Ephemeral Imagination
Heather Murray’s roots stem from her studies in editorial illustration at OCAD. She has always been drawn to the story behind the painting. Mixed media frees her to expand on an illustrative element without being bogged down by her own private censor. She enjoys the tactile feeling of textured papers, grooves in layers of paint and the simple act of overlapping for a new affect. Mixed media allows her to play with materials and liberate her subjects while expanding on her imagination and fondness for preserving elements from the past. She strives for a realist touch and achieves this through her medium without heartbreak. Her art becomes in fact an interesting hybrid of collage and painting- with a twist of whimsy and realism.
She is naturally drawn to the rural landscape as her backdrop of choice; where captivating portraits of people from the past intersect with beloved farm animals.
She works steadily out of her historical studio in the Old Courthouse Arts Building in Owen Sound while drawing her inspiration from her own backyard- just outside of Chatsworth Ontario.

Jack Nichols
_Montreal 1921 – _
Nichols is a self-taught painter, who worked for a time with artists Varley and Muhlstock. During the early 1940s, he worked as a summer deckhand on cargo boats plying the Great Lakes. In 1943, the National Gallery of Canada commissioned him to depict the activities of the Canadian Merchant Navy and he left on a mission to the Caribbean with Michael Forster. Enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy in February 1944, Nichols worked as an official war artist from April 1944 to August 1945. Most of his works depict the landing operations at Normandy and destroyer movements off Brest. In 1947 and 1948, he traveled and painted in the US on a Guggenheim fellowship, and taught at the Vancouver School of Art in 1948. He won a prize at the Second International Exhibition of Drawing and Engraving in Lugano, Switzerland in 1952. His lithographs were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958. Nichols currently lives in Toronto.

Philip Pearlstein
Pittsburgh May 24, 1924 –
Pearlstein is an American painter, and an important and innovative artist of the contemporary Realist school. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. A college friend of Andy Warhol, he accompanied Warhol to Manhattan in 1949, where they subleased an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment, and later loft West 23rd Street. During the time that Pearlstein began to work realistically, unlike many other modernists who rejected the Realist option in favour of Abstract expressionism. Reconsidering the realist option, he helped to reinvent figurative realism into a vital art form.
The Milwaukee Art Museum honoured him with a retrospective exhibition in 1983 and accompanied the exhibition with a monograph on his complete paintings.

William Perehudoff
_Langham (Saskatchewan) 1919 – _
A Canadian artist, he is most closely associated with Color field painting.
His formal education ended at grade 4. It was while he was working on his parents` farm near Saskatoon that he developed an interest in art. He studied with the French artist Jean Chariot at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1948-49 and with the French Purist Amedee Ozenfant in New York in 1949-50. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he was an active participant in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, and became a close friend of the art critic Clement Greenberg, having already been closely associated with Greenberg’s idea of Post-painterly Abstraction. By the mid 1960’s he was considered to be one of Canada’s major abstract painters. In 1988 he was a workshop leader at Emma Lake. His work has been widely exhibited in Canada with museum shows as well as shows in commercial art galleries across the country. His work is in private and public collections in Canada, the US and Europe. He is married to the landscape painter Dorothy Knowles. In 1994, he was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. Due to failing health, Perehudoff gave up painting in 2001.

Jean Alain Raffaelli
Paris April 20, 1850 – Paris February 11(29?), 1924
A French realist landscape, portrait, and genre painter, sculptor, engraver, lithographer, actor, and writer, Raffaëlli exhibited with the Impressionists. He showed an early interest in music and theatre before becoming a painter in 1870, when one of his landscape paintings was accepted for exhibition at the Salon. In 1871 he spent three months of study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his only formal training. Primarily creating costume pictures until 1876, after a voyage to Brittany Raffaëlli began to depict Parisian contemporaries in a realistic style, focussing on peasants, workers, and rag-pickers. Searching for his subjects in the life of ordinary people in the suburbs of Paris he acquired the favour of naturalist critics and writers. Through Degas who championed his work, he met with the impressionists. Degas forced the other artists to accept Raffaelli’s participation in the impressionist exhibitions of 1890 and 1891, despite his sombre palette. A solo exhibition in 1884 established his reputation once and for all. After executing a few notable portraits he resumed to genre painting and made a serious effort reproducing scenes of middle class life. Raffaelli made careful preliminary drawings in black and white of most of his canvases, and produced engravings with remarkable colors. He received many honours, including Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1889, gold medal at the Exposition Universal of 1889, and Legion of Honour in 1906. He was a member of the society Des Beaux-Arts.

Michael Ricks
Where does the letter as “writing” begin?
Using the Iconic Paradox the alphabet creates its own cognitive environment, substituting vision for voice in the writer; the eyes for the ears in the reader. Guided by the media percepts of Marshal McLuhan I set out on a personal journey to discover for myself the source of our primary technical medium of communication, the alphabet; the code in which our civilization frames all of its programs and applications. The end of my journey is the place of beginning.

Larry Rivers

Kris Rosar
ChromaZones Series
ChromaZones is a series of digital photographs of interiors and exteriors of homes, buildings and commercial spaces where colour is the dominant element. These images focus on colour as a tangible connection to the choices, activities and sensory affects that come from living in a physical world and, more importantly, in the associative qualities of colours, their meaning and value within different cultures. In many photographs, single colours predominate, while others, two or more colours are found as well as secondary elements such as signage. The inclusion of people is infrequent in the works, as I am more interested in portraying colours as evidence of human activity. In addition, I have researched written information about colour symbolism and identity from various sources. Some of the photographs are juxtaposed with text from Wikipedia in order to present new meanings about these settings. For example, the piece “Tangerine House” is paired with words such as “energy, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, flamboyance, playfulness, aggression, arrogance, gaudiness, over-emotion, warning, danger, fire (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/color_psychology) These digital images are printed on glossy Kodak Chromira paper, mounted on dibond, laminated and range in size from 33X40cm to 99X36 cm. Each piece sits out about an inch from the wall. In 2006, I lived in a small coastal community in New South Wales, Australia. While travelling in this country and in New Zealand, I encountered a number of vibrantly painted buildings and interiors. On my return to Canada, I continued to document places in Newfoundland and Ontario. The colour black has yet to be documented for inclusion in this portofolio. – Kris Rosar, September 2009

James Rosenquist
Grand Forks 29 November, 1933 – New York
Rosenquist is an acclaimed American artist and one of the leaders of the pop-art movement. Born in North Dakota of Swedish and Norwegian background, his family moved from town to town during the depression looking for work, and finally settled in Minneapolis in 1942. His mother, a painter, encouraged her son in artist pursuits. He won a short-term scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art, and later studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955, he moved to New York with a scholarship to study at the Art Students League. From 1957 to 1960, he earned his living as a billboard painter, perfect training for his subsequent explosion onto the pop art scene. Rosenquist applied sign-painting techniques, adapting advertising and pop culture to the context of fine art and the large-scale paintings he began creating in 1960. He achieved international acclaim in 1965 with the room-scale painting F-111. He has received numerous honours, and was appointed to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts in 1978. In 2002, the Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón conferred upon him its annual international award for art, in recognition of his great contributions to universal culture.

George Rouault

Joseph Sampson, AOCA
Canadian
Joe graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1995 with a specialization in illustration from the commercial design department. After OCA, he began freelancing as an illustrator while continuing to paint. Painting quickly became his sole occupation.
Joe’s portfolio is comprised of a variety of scenic imagery, and is currently focused on waterscapes. Drawn to shorelines, beaches, lakes, oceans and streams, Joe uses water imagery to depict the dichotomy between movement and immobility. A detailed understanding of light’s ability to create color, shadow and tone is utilized to set mood in each painting. Whether the focus is cold, warm, tranquil or angry, waters’ magnificence strikes the viewer and an emotional response is evoked. This is due, in part, to the large scale of the work. From a distance, the viewer is drawn towards what appears to be a photograph. Upon closer inspection, brushstrokes are revealed and the observer is made aware of the meticulous layers of brushwork, resulting in the illusion that the viewer is still for an instant, at the waters’ edge.

Jack Leonard Shadbolt
Shoeburyness, 4 Feb 1909 – Burnaby (Vancouver) 22 Nov 1998
Moving from England to British Columbia in 1912 Shadbolt became a renowned artist, teacher, author, and poet. Famous as a painter and draftsperson, he also wrote 3 books and many articles, and his teaching influenced art and artists across Canada and the US. After teaching art to children between 1929 and 1937, he joined the VSA, Vancouver School of Art. In the 1930s and 1940s, Shadbolt studied in London and Paris, and after serving in WWII from 1942-45 (including from 1944-45 as a Canadian War Artist) he studied at the Art Students’ League in New York. He returned to the VSA, where he served as head of drawing and painting until 1966. He conducted workshops and juried exhibitions throughout North America, and mounted 70 solo exhibitions of his own work. His many major international exhibitions included the Venice Biennale XXVIII, 4 major retrospective exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the BC Museum of Anthropology, the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum.

Deborah Lougheed Sinclair
Canadian (1953 – )

Harunobo Suzuki
1797-1858

Harold Barling Town
near Peterborough 13 Jun 1924 – Toronto 27 Dec 1990
Harold Town was a flamboyant and prolific Canadian painter, printmaker, critic, writer, and media personality, best known for his abstract paintings. He was a force in Canadian art from the 1950s to the 1970s. After studying art at technical school and at the Ontario College of Art, he worked as an illustrator for Canadian publications such as Maclean’s and Mayfair. From 1953 to 1960, Town and other abstract artists in Ontario formed the collective, Painters Eleven. The group hoped to make abstract art recognized commercially in Canada. He was an outspoken member and responsible for the name of the group and the forewords to their exhibition catalogues. In 1954, Town also gained notice with his lithographic prints that he called single autographic prints. After the collective disbanded, Town continued to enjoy success with his innovative collages, paintings, and prints. He also sculpted, illustrated books, and wrote articles and books and was the first artist in Canada to use burnt objects as an integral part of an abstraction.